Advanced Training

Imagine what it might be like to live in a completely behaviourally random world. You go to the cafe and order a latte, and the cashier asks for your hat and coat. As a cooperative citizen, you give it to the lady who throws it in the trash, as she calls out “NEXT” and turns her attention to the person behind you in line. You move down the counter to pick up your latte, and the barrista, comes out from behind the counter and grabs you and begins to waltz you around the Salvador Dali cafe and throws open the door and turfs you out onto the sidewalk. On the sidewalk, a bear in a business suit offers you a Rolex, cheap from inside his waistcoat and when you say no, he pulls out some flowers and hands them to you and approaches someone else on the street. Still wanting a latte you go back into the store, only to find that it is now filled with pink balloons and you cannot make your way to the counter. After much struggling, you catch the eye of the cashier and mention your latte and she says “no latte today, m’dear, only champers and cheese” and hands you a plate of candied almonds. Nothing you do can change the maelstrom of activity you have found yourself within. How would you feel?

Living in our world as it is depends on understanding things like the rules of the game, that gravity controls what floats and what doesn’t and who people are. When things stop being predictable, then it becomes very difficult to learn what to do. Salvador Dali had a talent for showing this concept visually in a playful and interesting way, never the less, few people would want to play checkers on a board where the pieces persist in falling through the board and where time expands and contracts independently of what the players do. Image credit: rolffimages / 123RF Stock Photo

When we work with dogs, they are forever looking for the way through the maze; the way to control their environment, the rules of the game. There are lots of games you can play and learn the rules through experience, and training is one of them. Yesterday, I worked with a lovely young terrier who is trying to figure out the rules. When she barks, she wants attention, and as a youngster, it worked well. She can make her person do all sorts of things by barking. Not wanting to disturb people, her person will come in to her and pick her up, or give her treats or tell her to be quiet or point a finger at her or tell her to lie down. Like trying to order a latte in the Salvadore Dali cafe, everything changes at every step of the game. So how can we make training an experiential fun game for the dog?

Think about games and activities that you have learned through experience. If someone invites you to play Scrabble and you have never played before, it might run like this. Your opponent will give you a hint or a clue or a starting point. Perhaps they will start by giving you a tile tray and some tiles and ask you to make some words in your tile tray without showing the words that you have found. Then your opponent will put down some tiles and the board and explain how the scoring works. Then it is your turn and you can take your letters and place them on the board to make a word that intersects the first word. You do this and your opponent scores your word for you and then it is his turn again. He makes a word that intersects a word on the board and you work out the scoring together. Turn by turn you learn the rules of the game, what strategies work and which strategies are ineffective. This is exactly how dogs learn when we train using operant conditioning.

Coming back to my terrier friend (she really is a friendly dog who is just trying to make sense of her world), what we set up for training was a contingency that allowed her to learn some rules through experience. The first thing we did was use a tether to limit where she could go; we set up a playing area so to speak. Then we clicked and treated to remind her that the game was starting and give her some information about the game and how it would work. Then we used four basic rules; if she was quiet, her person would stand close to her and wait. If she was barking, her person would take one step back for each bark, until he got to the far end of the room. After barking started, if she were quiet, her person would come back one step at a time. If she lay down, her person would click and treat. At first, she didn’t know the rules so she did a lot of different things to see what would happen.

When she barked, her person would step back. This frustrated her and so she barked louder. When her person was about twenty steps back, she stopped barking and he stepped forward. Then she barked again and he stepped back. For about five minutes, she learned how her behaviour affected the behaviour of her partner. Then abruptly, she lay down. Her partner came in and fed her a treat. And she barked. He backed up. She stopped barking and stood up. He stepped closer. She lay down, he gave her a treat. A very simple, but very predictable game, in which she controlled the behaviour of her partner.

This is how I think the best training works. The trainer decides on the game for the day. The trainer decides on what the contingencies are. Then the trainer allows the dog to work out the contingencies. The dog gets to decide if he wants to play or not and if the trainer has done his job well he has set up rules that make sense to the dog and the dog wants to play. In order to do this we have to understand some things about the game and about the dog we are working with.

If I have a dog who LOVES liver, but doesn’t love cheese, then it doesn’t matter what I want the dog to do, cheese is not going to help him to learn the rules of the game. Likewise if the penalty is something the dog doesn’t care about, then using that as a penalty isn’t going to work. If in the scenario that I presented above the dog was afraid of the handler and barking made him go away, the dog would learn that barking resulted in something he wanted and he would do more barking. I see this all the time in training. The person thinks that their dog should like something, and they offer it as a reward, and the dog when working out the rules figures out that he will get something he doesn’t want to have if he does a particular behaviour. This isn’t about the dog not wanting to play your game; this is about the dog not wanting what you have to offer.

Sometimes the task we are asking the dog to do is of no interest to him. If we ask a herding dog to go sit in a boat and retrieve ducks, no amount of liver is going to make that as fun for him as taking him out to herd sheep. In the best training the activities we do with our dogs are of interest to the dog. That said, there are always parts of the game that we might not enjoy; I hate setting up the board in Scrabble, but if I don’t do that part, I cannot do the part that I like doing. Manners are an example of activities that your dog must do in order to get to do things he likes better. Behaviours like greeting with four on the floor, taking treats gently, and keeping quiet are all behaviours that the dog must learn in order to be able to do things like playing agility, herding sheep or retrieving ducks. Teaching good manners allows us to do more fun things with our dogs later and also allows us to establish that the dog doesn’t live in a random world where nothing he does affects the world he lives within.

Luring is a tool that I often see in the training game that can be quickly and dangerously misused. Imagine if in my Salvador Dali coffee shop, the cashier kept holding out that latte that I wanted, but I could only get it by following her around. I might tolerate a lot of Rolex selling bears and pink balloons to get my lattte, but I probably wouldn’t enjoy the experience a whole lot more. Luring should be only used with caution and with respect for the dog. When a novice trainer discovers that he can make the dog sit by holding the lure over the dog’s head, it is a short and dangerous step to using the lure to get the dog to do things he might consider otherwise risky. Consider the dog who is not confident about getting onto a piece of agility equipment. The trainer puts the lure on the equipment, and the dog is then in a conundrum; he can get the treat, but he isn’t learning to control his environment any longer. He is conflicted because he wants the treat, but he has to do something that he considers dangerous to get that treat. He doesn’t learn to play the game as much as he learns to balance the conflict between what he wants and what he doesn’t want to do. Luring is even more dangerous when it is used to get the dog to interact with people or dogs he isn’t sure of, because he may at that point become aggressive. Luring, properly used tells the dog how to position his body, but that is all it should be used for. If the dog is concerned in any way about what you want him to do, pairing the thing he is concerned about to the thing he wants is a much safer bet than making his interaction the contingency that results in a treat.

Luring is a tool that can lead the dog into the Salvador Dali Cafe. It is best used to help the dog understand how his body ought to be positioned, but if it is abused and used to coerce the dog to do things that are uncomfortable or risky, then the dog loses control over how he interacts with the world and then he can end up in situations that don’t make sense to him or that actually put him at risk. In general, targeting can achieve the same results, with fewer risks. Image credit: simsonne100 / 123RF Stock Photo

As soon as worry comes into the game, then it is not fun anymore. Then it is time to play a different game; a game that will allow the learner to figure out that he is safe and that the world is a good place to interact with. When the dog is worried the game should simply be “see that scary thing? It produces treats” This game is great when it is played with the frightening thing far enough away that the dog can cope with his fear. Only when fear dissolves can you switch back to a game of “if you interact with the thing you are worried about, you will get a treat”.

When we think about training as a game, we can set up a series of rules and outcomes that the dog can be successful at. Teaching dogs to be confident is contingent on the dog being repeatedly successful. If the dog is successful over and over again, the dog starts to think that he can do many more things than he used to be able to do. Perhaps the worst thing we can do to our dogs is create a random world where they cannot control what they live with. Overwhelming dogs with repeated conflicts or failures results in a dog who lacks confidence and who doesn’t want to participate in training games. If your dog feels like he is living in the Salvador Dali coffee shop, don’t be surprised if he stops participating in the training game, or if he becomes tense or fearful or anxious. Just writing about the Salvador Dali cafe is difficult because none of it makes sense and there is no control over the outcomes. When there is no control over your world, learning is inefficient and upsetting and pretty soon you have a dog who just doesn’t want to participate any more.

Many years ago, I had two clients in class. One very energetic bouncy happy lady had a very energetic bouncy happy border collie. The other very quiet laidback low key lady had a very quiet laid back low key Malamute. When it came time to teach the dogs to come when called, the very energetic bouncy happy lady handed me her dog’s leash, I held the dog by the collar and she jumped up and down and up and down and made squeaky enticing noises and ran away and called her dog. Her very energetic very bouncy happy dog raced joyously to her and promptly bounced her to the ground where the two of them had a very energetic, very bouncy happy love fest. Next, the very quiet laidback low key lady handed me her dog’s leash and I held her dog by the collar as she ambled slowly away and stopped half way to the end of our training field to tie her shoe lace. She got up and slowly continued to the end of the field where she turned and calmly asked the dog to come. I released the dog’s collar and he very slowly, very quietly and calmly ambled towards her, stopping once to sit down and scratch, and then to sniff and go pee, and then he wandered off towards the other dogs in the class waiting for their turn at the exercise.

If I want to teach THIS dog to come to me without bouncing me to the ground, I will need to ask him to come in such a way that I don’t cause him to come so quickly that he cannot stop without hitting me. This is just one aspect of what I need to do in order to be successful when I am training a dog. Copyright: bigandt / 123RF Stock Photo

Week after week, I coached these two trainers on how to get better recalls. Relax a bit I told the very energetic bouncy happy lady, and he won’t knock you over when he gets to you. Get a little more excited and interesting for your dog I coached the quiet laidback low key lady, so that your dog is a little more excited to get to you. The more I coached them, the more extreme each of these ladies seemed to get. The very bouncy lady got bouncier, and the quiet lady got calmer and even more reserved. One day in exacerbation, I had them trade dogs and each dog had a much better recall. Of course over time, each of the handlers DID improve however the bouncy lady was still bouncy and the quiet lady was still quiet. Luckily they each had dogs to suit their own temperaments!

This scenario really highlights something I see in my classes though. We have to give the dogs what they need in order to learn. We can only teach the dogs what they have the foundations to understand and we must present the material we want them to learn in such a way that they will be successful in their activities. If we don’t we won’t be successful in our training. In short, we have to travel at the speed of dog.

When I see dogs struggling in class I start out by asking myself if the dog has all the information he needs in order to learn the task. If we are teaching a dog to go away from us for instance, and we start by asking the dog to move out 20 metres, and the dog doesn’t know how to go two metres away from us on cue, then we are very unlikely to be able to build a solid, happy and energetic go out. We need to understand the mechanics of what we are working on (coming when called usually works better when the person is a longer not shorter distance from the dog for instance), what motivates the dog, and what the dog already knows in order to be successful. I have taught the long distance go out a number of different ways, all depending on which dog I am working with. The point is that I have to travel at the speed of dog in each and every instance.

Another thing I need to consider when I am teaching dogs is what their own way is of moving through the world. I tend to be a fairly intense, high energy handler. I do best with confident, pushy dogs who enjoy my big personality, but as a professional dog trainer, I have to train calm quiet dogs, timid dogs, energetic silly dogs and dogs who just defy classification. In other words I have to be flexible in the way that I interact with dogs.

I also have to be flexible in my behaviour when I am teaching different exercises. When I am teaching a dog to perform a self control exercise such as the down stay, it is better to start out by being low key and neutral. When I want to teach a dog to come to me from a distance, it generally pays better to be a little bit exciting, unless of course you are working with a dog like my student had who was charging her and knocking her over.

Another aspect to travelling at the speed of dog is the rate at which we give the dog information. Ideally we want the dog to offer enough iterations of the behaviour that he can get sufficient rewards to tell him what it is that we want. We have to set up the dog so that he gets the right answer quickly and efficiently and if he has not received a reward recently we cannot be surprised when he disengages from the activity and does his own thing.

This dog is engaged in his own activity, so you would need to be very aware of how much information you need to give him, how fast that information came, and not overusing his name to nag him. Copyright: chalabala / 123RF Stock Photo

Not only do we have to give the dog enough information to know when he is right, but we also have to give him cues in a timely manner. I have watched many students say the dog’s name and then wait and wait and wait before giving the dog the cue to the behaviour that will earn a reward. The only thing this achieves is a dog learning that in the training context, he should disregard his name! If your dog is engaged, you likely don’t need to use his name at all. You can learn more about how to effectively use your dog’s name at https://mrsbehaviour.com/2015/06/13/your-dogs-name-an-operating-manual/ . Similar to this issue is when you have a dog who has performed a behaviour, and the handler delays the next cue for a very long time. This leaves the dog hanging so that he doesn’t quite know what is coming up next, and if he is not eagerly engaged in the activity to begin with, he will just wander off to do his own thing.

Travelling at the speed of dog requires us as trainers to be aware of a number of variables and factor them all in when we are working with our dogs. If the dog we are working with tends to be excitable, we need to tone down. If that same dog needs to perform that behaviour with exuberance, then we can bring our own enthusiasm up a bit and help them to express the appropriate amount of energy for the given activity. We need to avoid overwhelming the dog with too much or too little information. Developing the ability to juggle all these factors can feel very overwhelming for many of us, however then they are all in balance, the dog travels along through the training game along side of us and learns effectively and efficiently.

Recently a number of Good Dog clients have started my program after having gotten only so far with obedience classes with us or other schools, and there seems to be a trend in why their training is not working for them. Micromanagement is how we describe what is happening when people tell the dog about every single thing that they are supposed to do. They often have a spectacular leave it, but only when they tell the dog. The dog will wait nicely at the door, but bolt on through if you haven’t specified that this is one of the times that the dog must wait. The dog is more than willing to get off or stay off furniture if he is told, but in the absence of information, he is right up there and on the couch.

Humans are a species that gather information verbally. We listen to details like “don’t get on the couch” and store that information for later use. If we are told “don’t get on the couch” every time we go to get on the couch, most of us store that information and don’t do that behaviour. Dogs are a little different. Although dogs readily learn “if I get on the couch in the presence of the human I will be told to get off” they don’t seem to generalize that information to “never get on the couch”. I suspect that this is a reflection of a few things, including how we train them.

The first thing that this reflects is that dogs don’t have language in the same way we do. Yes, they have communication, where they are able to send units of information to another individual who can receive and interpret them accurately. Think about the last time you saw two dogs interacting; if one dog wanted to play, how can he convey that information to the other dog? Dogs have a whole lot of gestural communication including (but not limited to!) play bows, play faces, head tilts, paw lifts and tail wags. The receiving dog will either accept the invitation, and a play session will start (full of rich gestures that convey all sorts of information between the players) or turn it down and we can tell which choice the recipient made based on the behaviours we see. None of this information conveys anything like “later on, when you go home, please don’t touch my toys that I left behind the couch”. Canine communication is immediate. It happens in the moment and it pertains to the moment. Even wolf communication involved in hunting runs more along the lines of “let’s go hunting”, “okay”, “I hear caribou over this way”, “I will flank the herd”. The last guess may in fact be more than they actually convey in their gestures, but it makes for a better story to illustrate the point!

Next we should consider that when we train our dogs we teach them to attend to what happens next. Sit when I am making you dinner? Then I put your dinner within your reach to eat. Jump up on me? Then you can have a quick trip to your crate. Harass the other dog while he is trying to rest? Then you can have a turn out in the yard on your own. Lie down nicely in front of the cookie cupboard? Then you can have a cookie. On and on, both formally and informally we teach our dogs to pay attention to immediate outcomes. Practically this is the most efficient way to teach dogs what they should and should not do.

Dogs do learn what your habits are of course, but most often those habits come with predictable immediate outcomes. Dogs learn for instance that every day at 3pm the school bus passes by and the kids arrive home and when the kids arrive home, you almost always get to play ball. Some dogs will anticipate this sort of activity by bringing the ball to the children as they come in the door. This most likely evolves when the ball is handy and the kids are available and the dog puts two and two together, not because the dogs are preplanning the equipment needed to make the activity work better. Over time and with repetition, dogs can develop sophisticated routines that look like preplanning but there is little concrete evidence that dogs are preplanning in the way that we do.

So what does this have to do with the Queen? Or my brother in law? Or my students who are struggling with micromanagement? Simply this. If you were invited to the UK to visit the Queen, you would have a meeting with a very nice person who would explain what was going to happen, what you were supposed to do and what you were not permitted to do. When you arrived at the Queen’s “house” (castle, palace or what have you), there would most likely be a nice person to point you in the right direction and prompt your every step. Stand here. Turn that way when I signal you that her Majesty is coming. When you first see Her Majesty do this. When you are greeted say that. When she turns away from you, do this. If she hands you something take it like this. Don’t touch her. Don’t initiate conversation. Answer in this way. Every little detail is preplanned and organized so that you know exactly what to do, how to do it and when to do it. And if you goof, then it is most likely that someone will help you out and make a suggestion about what you should do instead.

Meeting Royalty is a very carefully scripted event and for most of us, we need the help of someone like a protocol officer to guide us through the experience without any glitches. This is not real life for the vast majority of the world however, and it is a stressful and difficult way to interact because it necessitates someone else directing your every move.

This is how many of my clients treat their dogs. The client behaves like the Queen’s protocol officer! They walk up to a door and say “sit”. Dutifully, the dog sits. They open the door and the dog, not getting another immediate prompt drags them through the door and into the training hall. There is a dropped treat in front of the dog, and the client says “leave it” so the dog quite politely does, but when there is a treat the person doesn’t notice, the dog snarfs it up before the client even has a chance to do anything! How often I have been greeted by an otherwise normal human being chanting “be nice, be nice, be nice, be nice” as though saying these two words fast enough and for long enough will ensure that the dog will “be nice”. Invariably the human effort at being the protocol officer fails and the dog greets me by launching himself at me like a canine cannonball.

I would argue that if you were taking your dog to somewhere truly different and out of the ordinary, you might want to be the protocol officer. So if you have to take your dog to say a ballet recital, you might possibly want to play protocol officer. But UNLESS you are asking your dog to do something truly difficult, such as meeting a world leader, your dog needs to be able to just fit in. This is where visiting my brother-in-law comes in.

This is a difficult situation, made more difficult by the fact that the dog who is on leash is pulling and thus being pulled back by the handler. If instead the dog had been taught that when she wanted to play with a friend, she should sit, and offer eye contact and then look at the other dog and look back at the handler, the situation would look much different.

My brother-in-law is a nice guy. He likes to sit out on his front porch with a cup of coffee and the newspaper on a Sunday morning. He likes to go cycling. He is pretty approachable, and will invite you in for a beer if you walk by on a Saturday afternoon while he is puttering in the garage. He doesn’t own a crown, or a thrown, and he doesn’t care if you turn your back on him when you are in his presence. He goes to work Monday to Friday, he enjoys his family, he is the master of the bar-b-que. In short, he is a pretty laid back typical Canadian guy. And if you visit him, there is no protocol officer to tell you where to stand, what to do or not do, how to dress and what to say. No one will micromanage your behaviour when you visit my brother-in-law.

This doesn’t mean that there are not expectations for your behaviour while in my brother-in-law’s home. He would prefer you didn’t break his stuff, and please don’t eat all his food all at once. Please don’t take his things away when you leave, and please do take off your shoes when you come in the house. The thing is that his expectations for your behaviour are common enough that you don’t need someone to explain what to do at every step.

Commonly Micromanaged Behaviours and Their Alternatives

Behaviour

Common Micromanagement Strategy

Alternate Strategy

Dog snatches any edible item within reach

Teach the dog to leave things on cue and tell the dog to leave it

Teach the dog that he must automatically leave any edible items he finds UNLESS you tell him to take it

Dog jumps on guests

Teach the dog to cease jumping up on cue and tell the dog to stop jumping

Teach the dog that a guest approaching means that he should sit or lie down

Dog bolts out the door

Teach the dog to sit on cue and tell the dog to sit when you see the door opening

Teach the dog that an opening door means that he should sit

Dog is more engaged with other dogs or people when he sees them than he is with the handler

Teach the dog to make eye contact on cue and ask for eye contact

Teach the dog to make eye contact with you and then look at the dog or person he wants to greet and then re engage with you

Dog barks at passersby

Teach the dog to “hush” on cue and then tell the dog to “hush” when he is barking

Teach the dog that passersby do not need to be barked at

Dog chases the cat in the house

Teach the dog a solid leave it on cue and then tell the dog to leave it when he is chasing the cat

Teach the dog that chasing the cat is not permitted at all, ever

Dog grabs the toy before you can throw it

Teach the dog to leave it on cue and then tell the dog not to touch the toy until you have thrown it

Teach the dog that you will throw the toy when he is calm and not touching you, or even when he is sitting and making eye contact

The problem I see with many of the dogs who come through my door at the training hall is that the human partner in the team seems to think that day to day interactions need to be handled like a visit to the Queen. I see people telling their dogs to sit at the door all the time. And to leave the treats that are within reach. And not to jump on people as they approach. The problem with this strategy is that if you aren’t there to micromanage the dog, the dog will do just as he pleases. If you don’t tell him to sit at the door, he might barge right on through. And if you don’t tell him to leave the treats on the floor, he will just dart out to take them. If you don’t prevent him from jumping on guests, then he will greet impolitely and possibly with disastrous consequences! None of this is what the human wants, but the only solution they have tried is to remind, remind, remind, remind and then remind again.

What if instead of reminding we took what we know about how dogs use information and taught them an expected behaviour. What if we taught the dog that the door itself was the prompt to sit and wait? Or if instead of teaching your dog to leave a treat when told, we just taught him to keep his nose out of treats that you haven’t told him belong to him? What if we taught him that a person reaching out to say hi means that he should sit or lie down? What if we looked at training as if we were preparing someone from a different country to visit my brother-in-law?

This sort of interaction doesn’t happen by accident! Likely these two animals were posed for the picture, however they would not be completely relaxed in the image if the dog had been taught that he could chase the cat unless told otherwise. Dogs need immediate relevant consequences to teach them what they should do. If this were my cat and my dog, the dog would learn very quickly that every time he chased the cat, he would have a turn in his crate for a short period of time. This works especially well with young dogs. Copyright: dikaya37 / 123RF Stock Photo

Turning the training paradigm around so that we are no longer teaching the dog to do as he is told, but instead to know what the conventions are is a very easy way to resolve a lot of problems. To do this, you must spend some time thinking about how to accomplish making the trigger to the behaviour the cue to the alternate behaviour, and some of the time it means providing a consequence such as going to your crate or losing a turn at play to stop the undesired behaviour. It usually takes a little longer, but in the end, you have an adult dog who knows what to do, when to do it and doesn’t need a protocol officer to micromanage all of his behaviours!

We are very fortunate in Guelph to have an excellent resource for physical rehab for dogs! Very often we hear people asking if they can use their home treadmill to exercise their dogs, and we always tell them that it is a bad idea. Dr. Liz Pask of Gilmour Road Veterinary Services has kindly shared her thoughts in this guest blog for us, explaining about the risks of using a human treadmill to exercise your dog! Thanks Dr. Pask!

Treadmills are common tools to help us to keep fit, especially when the weather is bad and we cannot get outside to walk or run. Have you considered a treadmill for your dog? If you have a home treadmill, it probably is not safe for him!

Dog Treadmills VS. Human Treadmills – What’s the difference?

A common question is “Can I use my human treadmill for my dog?” In the majority of cases the answer is no. Here’s why:

– The human gait is shorter than the canine gait, which means the belt is usually too short for dogs. While your dog may be able to “fit” on the treadmill, they will not be able to use their bodies correctly, which can lead to injury.

– Even if you have a little dog who can fully extend on a human treadmill, human treadmills often don’t go slow enough for their little legs.

– Canine treadmills have many safety features built in with your dog in mind. Human treadmills often have gaps next to the belt, or raised caps at the end where paws and nails can be caught. Canine treadmills will have side rails to keep your pet safely on the treadmill; many human treadmills do not have side rails or they are at an inappropriate height.

– The control panel on a human treadmill is not located in an easily accessible area, making it difficult to adjust speed or stop quickly in case of an emergency.

The two brands that we recommend people explore if they are looking into a treadmill are DogTread or the dogPACER. We do not recommend the use of carpet treadmills.

This underwater treadmill is especially designed to help dogs to recover from injuries, and it has a lot of different safety features so that the dogs don’t get injured when they are using it. Even so, dogs are never left unattended in the treadmill and there is an emergency stop button to use if they get into trouble.

Whether at home or at an outside facility, dry or underwater, always make the treadmill is appropriate and safe for your dog.

For all your canine and feline conditioning and rehabilitation medicine needs, or if you have questions about the above article, feel free to contact us:

For anyone who has been in my classroom, you likely have realized that I am not going to ever be a supermodel. Aside from being 40 years too old, and the wrong body type, I just don’t care about clothing, hair and make up enough to bother. Incidentally, if you are curious, it is Sue writing, not John, but he probably would not be a super model either. Aside from being the wrong gender, and the wrong body type, he really just doesn’t care enough about clothing, hair or make up to bother either. Which brings me to a thought about our dogs. How many of our dogs are being asked to do jobs they just don’t care about?

Training is the way that we acquire skills and it doesn’t matter if you are a human, a dog or a dolphin, skills are important. In theory I have the skills needed to be a supermodel; I can walk, and wear clothes and if pressed, I can sit around while someone plays with my hair and puts make up on me. Maybe I don’t have the fine tuned strut that a model needs, but I can wear clothing, and I can walk, so what is preventing me from being a super model? Opportunity? Nope. I just don’t have the patience for the work! I would need a great deal of training and incentive to do that and you would have a very hard time convincing me that the work is relevant to my wellbeing.

This is just not me! I would not be happy doing this type of work. Sometimes we ask our dogs to do work that they don’t understand or like. We should ask ourselves if this is actually a good idea. Copyright: fashionstock / 123RF Stock Photo

So what about our dogs? You will hear me say over and over again that trained dogs get to do more, and that we should be willing to teach our dogs to do different things, so why not take up whatever sport the handler wishes? Recently, one of our instructors came to me to let me know that she had pulled out of one of our advanced classes, not because she and her dog were not learning things but rather because her dog was not enjoying the work. “My dog is doing this to please me, but she doesn’t actually like it” was the message I got. And good for the handler in recognizing that.

There are behaviours that I want every dog of mine to learn, regardless of how they feel about it; coming when called, not dragging me down the street, allowing the vet to examine them and lying down and staying for instance. These are the skills that allow our dogs to live successfully with us, but they are not their job. Have you thought about what your dog’s job might be? Many of us come to obedience classes because that is what we are supposed to do with our dogs, and then slot them into the jobs we want them to do without much more thought than that.

The problem with this is that many of our dogs are not actually interested in doing the work we wish them to do. As a behaviour consultant this is a daily frustration, as the Good Dog students probably all know. Consider what happens when we breed a dog to herd sheep 8 hours a day, and we expect that he is going to enjoy sitting on the couch day in and day out without any exercise. What might happen? Might that dog begin to engage in behaviours such as racing around the house and barking at traffic going by?

Many of my students want their dogs to participate in sports such as rally or agility and for most dogs, they really get into that. Some dogs don’t though. Some dogs prefer things like nosework, or tracking. When we put together our advanced classes, some of our students try and take as many of them as they can, and while we encourage everyone to give each class a try, it is really important to stay tuned in to your dog to discover which of these classes make you both happy.

All this preamble is probably bringing you to the point of asking yourself what to do if your dog doesn’t want to do the one thing that is really important to you? What do you do when you love agility and your dog just doesn’t like it? Or maybe the only thing that matters to you to do with your dog is hiking and your dog just doesn’t like to go out in anything other than the ideal weather?

Agility is a sport that many different dogs like, but even in such a middle of the road sport, there are dogs who don’t think this is fun. It is important to listen to our dog’s preferences especially as we ask them to perform more and more difficult or advanced work! Copyright: mackland / 123RF Stock Photo

The first thing I like to do is to is to try and figure out why the dog doesn’t want to engage in the behaviour. I once had a client who purchased a husky to go and run with him. As it turned out, we happened to have a very hot summer when he was just the right age to start running at about 18 months. The husky learned very quickly that running gear meant that he was going to become hot and uncomfortable. The husky was no dummy! He learned that running was uncomfortable so he didn’t like running.. He LOVED to run, but not with the owner or on leash. The only thing we had to do to change the activity was to choose running times when the weather was cooler. By taking the dog’s comfort into account, we were able to teach him to like the activity. As the old saying goes, if I had a nickel for every dog who was uncomfortable in the desired activity, I would be a whole lot richer!

Sometimes the dog is behaviourally unsuited to the work that the owner wants to do. Recently I saw a post on a hunting list I follow. The person on the list wanted a dog to go duck hunting with, but his wife wanted a German Shepherd. The person asking the question wanted to know how good German Shepherds might be at duck hunting. As it happened, I once had a German Shepherd who was pretty decent at fetching ducks. He enjoyed it and he was technically good at it, but there were a few problems. Firstly, he got a LOT of water in his ears. There is a really good reason why retrievers ALL have dropped ears! Secondly, once he was wet, it took a long time for him to dry off and if I had asked him to retrieve in the late fall when goose hunting usually happens, he would have gotten very wet and cold and likely he would not have thought that retrieving was quite that much fun. Even though he was good at retrieving, including in water, he much preferred to do tracking.

This dog is big enough to pick up a goose and carry it and he has enough coat to tolerate the kind of weather in which goose hunting happens. He should also like to swim, and be tolerant of gun shots to be good at this work. In other words, this is a job for a Chesapeake Bay Retriever, but likely not for a Yorkshire Terrier! Copyright: schlag12 / 123RF Stock Photo

Sometimes something happens during training that makes the activity you want to do more difficult for your dog. If you keep changing your mind about the behaviours you want when preparing do to an activity, the activity itself can become very frustrated. I did this to one of my dogs early in my obedience career. I kept changing how I was approaching training with this particular dog, and ended up just confusing the dog. The dog got to the point where she was confused, annoyed and frustrated and just really didn’t enjoy obedience competitions. I had a coach who noticed that I was creating frustration and we were able to work through it however, if I had persisted I might have eventually caused much more damage to the relationship I had with that dog. We went on to have a great relationship once I straightened out my training program.

If an activity with a dog is really important to you, consider that BEFORE you get the dog and choose a dog who is going to start out with an aptitude and an interest in that activity. There is a reason that we usually choose hounds for trailing, and herding dogs for rounding up sheep. These dogs have been bred for a long time to do that work, and allowing the dogs to do what they were bred to do helps a lot.

If you already have a dog and he doesn’t like doing the activity, you may want to either do less of the activity, or stop doing it altogether. If you have a dog who does a lot of things they really like, and you only ask the dog to do something you like that the dog doesn’t some dogs might be willing to “play the game” to humour you if you don’t ask him to do the activity too often. The key is take your canine partner into consideration, and like the trainer at our facility, choose activities that both you and your dog will enjoy.

Dogs love food. Well, mostly dogs love food. Food is such a contentious issue. People don’t always like to use food in training, and often even when people do use food, they either don’t use it effectively or they struggle with a dog who doesn’t want to take treats. In the training hall we often see people making all sorts of food errors, so it is time to write a blog about how to use food.

Most dogs really love food and spend a lot of time thinking about it. When food isn’t working in training, there are often things we can do to help!

The first issue we see is the “switcheroo”. The switcheroo happens when a dog hits early adolescence and growth slows down. Most families get a young puppy and are astounded at how many calories that little perpetual motion machine can suck back. Let’s say that a pup is 3kg when he comes home, and he is eating one scoop of dog food in total each day. Within 6 weeks that puppy is now 10kg, and eating three scoops of dog food each day! Skip forward another two months and the puppy is 20kg and eating five scoops a day, and then 8 weeks more and he is 30kg and eating 7 scoops a day. This brings our pupster to about 7 and a half months of age and all of a sudden Fido stops eating. In a panic, the average family goes out and spends a pile of money on a different bag of dog food and Fido resumes eating. A week or so later, Fido goes on strike again, and the family spends more money on a third brand of food. Fido resumes eating and two weeks later goes on strike. At about this point, Fido who should be 35kg is a solid 40kg, and has become a picky eater, and the client tells me in class that Fido won’t work for food.

So what is really happening in the “switcheroo”? Often what is happening is that Fido has stopped growing and doesn’t need 7 scoops of dog food! When you change dog foods, novelty will get Fido to eat again, but he doesn’t really need all the extra calories, so a week or two later, he self limits his food and you worry that he isn’t eating enough. You switch again and the novelty entices him to eat for a bit and then he hits another point where the calories are just too much and he stops eating again.

So what happens to food training when the old “switcheroo” is at play? Often the dog stops wanting to work for food because he is already getting far too many calories in his bowl. The first thing that I do is check with the family to make sure that there is nothing going on that would indicate the need for a vet visit. I do a quick visual inspection of the dog and feel his ribs to see what his body score is. The easy way to tell what your dog’s body score is would be to first feel your dog’s ribs and then find the part of your hand that is most similar to your dog’s ribs. Use the pictures below to determine if your dog is overweight. If your dog is overweight, but everything else is normal; he is drinking and exercising and toileting normally, then the first thing I would do would be to feed a bit less food in his bowl. Dogs love to eat, but they are also usually really good at self regulating when they get overweight and then they get fussy about the treats they want for training.

Usually with an adolescent dog who has had several different foods because he has become picky, we see his appetite normalize and his willingness to work for regular food return when we remove some of the calories from the bowl. This is the easiest situation to resolve when it comes to food and training. Once you figure out how much your dog should be eating, take the total amount for the day and divide it by three. Feed 1/3 at breakfast, 1/3 at dinner and save 1/3 for training class. Let’s look at my German Shepherd Eco as an example.

There are so many options when it comes to feeding your dog and it can be tempting to just change foods if your dog is not eating reliably. If your dog is already eating a quality diet, consider trying decreasing the quantity of food that you are putting in the bowl before changing the diet. If your dog is not on a good diet or if they have a medical issue, you should talk to your vet before changing your dog’s diet.

When I got Eco at 7 and a half weeks of age he ate a whopping 2/3 cup of kibble each day. Total. By the time he was 12 weeks he was eating 1 ½ cups, and at 16 weeks he was eating 2 ½ cups. His intake steadily increased over the weeks and months until at 7 months he was about 40kg and was eating a total of 12 cups a day divided into four meals, and he was a lean, mean fast moving doggy machine. I remember thinking at this age that I sure hoped he would slow down soon as I was going to go broke feeding this dog! Predictably at about 8 months he started to skip a meal. That meant that all of a sudden, he went from eating 12 cups a day reliably to eating 9. Whew! That was cheaper! I started to feed three meals a day, but instead of feeding three cups per meal, I fed 2 cups per day and kept 3 cups aside for training. At about ten months of age, Eco started to pretty reliably skip one of his three meals each day, so I took another three cups of food out of his daily ration, which brought us down to a much more reasonable 6 cups per day, and divided that into three, making 2 cups per serving, Eco went to two regular meals and two cups set aside for school. By the time Eco was four he was normally eating about 4 cups of food a day, and just got a few treats in class. Mostly in class at four, he would work for play.

The next thing I have seen in class is the dog who will only work for ultra high value treats. A number of things can be at play there. The first of them is that when the dog is very stressed or overwhelmed, he cannot eat. This should not be a surprise; the same happens to people too. Consider what it might be like to be in a car accident and then have someone offer you a nice dinner. Most of us would find that situation too stressful to allow us to enjoy eating. The same thing can happen when the dog is extremely excited, and that is also true for us. Most of us don’t feel like eating when we are engaged in something like riding a rollercoaster.

Both of these ladies are really excited. One of them is happy about her excitement and the other lady is a little more concerned. Neither of these ladies would probably want to eat a sandwich if I were to offer them one, because when you are really excited, you are not really interested in food!

Other things can contribute to dogs only wanting to take high value treats too. When your dog comes to class overweight, they are going to be really picky about what they will take as treats. Similarly, if he comes to class right after eating a large meal, he will be willing to take dessert class treats, but not lower value treats. One thing that people often try is to completely deprive their dogs before class. This can backfire too; often dogs who have been deprived enough can be so deeply focused on any food at all that they cannot even think. It is far better to feed more sensibly, and come to class with a dog who is neither overweight nor completely deprived.

Dogs definitely have preferences, and there is a lot of value to knowing what your dogs prefers. I have worked with dogs who do not like liver and making a dog take a treat he doesn’t want works against you as a trainer, even if it is a treat you want your dog to like or if it is a treat you think your dog will like. I have also worked with dogs who like really unusual things like cooked squash, raw celery or blueberries. When I have a dog with strong preferences, I often rank the treats. When I know for instance that a dog likes liver best, and then rollover and then cheese and then bread and finally kibble. I will sometimes take some time to teach the dog to take lower value treats. Working in a low distraction environment I will offer the dog his lowest value item. If he takes the treat, I reward him with the next value treat. In this case, I will offer kibble. If the dog takes a piece of kibble, then he gets a piece of bread. I then offer the dog another piece of kibble. Most dogs will look longingly at the bread. Hold out. If the dog takes the kibble, he gets another treat but THIS time, he gets the next level up; so I would feed him some cheese. Next I will offer him another piece of kibble. He will likely look out for another piece of cheese. Hold out. When he takes his kibble, he will get the next thing on his list; in this case the rollover. Then offer more kibble again. When the dog takes the kibble he gets his top value treat; in this case the liver. I keep working with the dog offer kibble to get a better reward. I keep working on this until the dog will willingly take a low value treat regardless of the situation, in the hopes of getting a better treat.

Perhaps the most common error I see in the training hall is reinforcing every single behaviour without any differential between good iterations and not so good iterations. If you ask your dog to sit and he lies down, and you give him a treat because he did SOMETHING, anything, you are in fact teaching him that trying random behaviours is really valuable, but it doesn’t teach your dog that when you say sit, you mean sit, or when you say down, you mean down. You can actually use treats very constructively to teach your dog the difference between a really, really valuable behaviour such as a fast, accurate sit, when you ask the first time, and a slow reluctant sloppy sit. To teach the difference between a fast snappy sit and a slow casual sit, you can simply choose to reward the best sits to reward with the favourite treat, and then reward the sloppy undesired sits with a low value treat. Dogs can learn really quickly that a good sit gets a good treat, and a poor sit gets a less preferred treat.

Dogs also need to learn about self control around food before you start training. If your dog thinks that if he can see the treat, he can have the treat, then he is going to have a harder time learning to get the treats by doing something to earn them. I like to start all training by teaching the dog to control himself around food (https://mrsbehaviour.com/2015/11/12/the-dog-controls-the-dog/ ). Once your dog has learned not to snatch treats as soon as he sees them, you can start to use your treats much more effectively.

As with many tools, treats are a good servant but a poor master. When used well, food is perhaps the best way that you can teach a dog. When used poorly you can teach your dog all sorts of bad habits.

I think that starting with full disclosure is a really important thing for this blog. Let me be clear; I don’t speak Turkish. I have never taken a class in the Turkish language, and I have very few friends who come from Turkey. Actually, I currently have no friends who come from Turkey. If you were to ask me to pass the salt in Turkish, I would not have a clue. If you are really curious about how to say “Please pass the salt” in Turkish, you can listen to that here https://tinyurl.com/yd8wn9nb . Let’s be honest though, no matter how loud, or how slowly, or how clearly you say “Lütfen tuzu geç” to me, I am not likely to know that salt is what you want.

I would love to have a meal in Turkey, with figs and dates and served on a lovely silver tea set, but I could not ask for the salt, because I don’t speak Turkish! Copyright: tashka2000 / 123RF Stock Photo

If we were in Turkey, and at dinner, and someone at the table said to me “Lütfen tuzu geç” and pointed at the salt, I would likely guess correctly that salt was what the other person wanted, but I still would not speak Turkish, and if the Turkish speaker asked me the same thing out of context, I would have no idea what they were talking about. I think this is often what dogs go through when we talk to them.

Dogs are amazing at their ability to pick up information. My dogs all know what I mean when I say “Dog in a box” (our cue for getting into their crates), or “hup” (our cue for getting in the car) or “two paws” (our cue for dogs coming onto our laps to cuddle), and I never really trained those things; they learned the cues in context and then over time generalized the behaviours to a bunch of new scenarios. They picked up the lingo so to speak, just as I might if I spent enough time at Turkish dinner tables to hear “Lütfen tuzu geç” often enough that I could pick it out of conversation.

My dogs also know all the regular obedience cues such as sit, down, stay, here, heel, let’s go, over, tunnel and piddle; I taught my dogs those cues very carefully and they have long histories of being rewarded for the correct behaviour when they do as they are asked, and I have carefully taught them what the sound “sit” means so they know what I am talking about.

I see the Turkish language problem occurring when people have incompletely taught a behaviour and they assume that because their dogs understand what to do in one context that the dog will know what to do in every context. Similar to my example of learning to pass the salt when asked at the table and then not recognizing the words when taken out of context, many dogs are simply confused when they are asked to do something that doesn’t fit with their experience.

This young dog has no clue about what the owner wants him to do, even though the context should be apparent to him; he has probably been on a leash before and he is wearing a front attachment harness, so likely some training has already happened. Simply yelling heel or saying heeeeeel in a slow drawn out manner is not going to make matters clear to him. Slowing down and reviewing what the dog does know, and what he needs to learn helps a lot more! Copyright: loganban / 123RF Stock Photo

Perhaps the most common behaviour I see this with is the recall, or come when called behaviour. When you call a dog to come, you likely have an internal picture of what you want. You call out “Fido come” and you want Fido to drop whatever he is doing and come racing towards you. Often when clients ask for help with the recall, they cannot tell me how they taught the dog to come when called in the first place. If the training session was too dim for you to remember how you taught that behaviour, likely it was not a very meaningful experience for your dog either. Think back to teaching your dog to come when called. What steps did you take? Where were you when to taught your dog to do this behaviour? How rewarding was it for your dog to do the behaviour? If you cannot remember, then maybe, you are speaking Turkish to your non Turkish speaking dog!

Another problem that can occur with misunderstood cues is simply that you over structured the learning so that the dog learned the words, but only in the context of what you were doing. So many of my students taught their dogs to stay and then to come out of the stay when called. This is perhaps the most confusing way for a dog to learn the recall, and has nothing to do with leaving the rotting dead fish your dog wants to roll in in order to come racing towards you when you call; this is akin to teaching me to pass the salt by describing the chemical formula by which you would concoct salt in a laboratory. Sodium Cloride is the chemical name for table salt and you can make it very simply by taking Sodium hydroxide and Hydrochloric acid and mixing them together as they do in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erWTsWut7Vc . Knowing how to make table salt in the lab just isn’t useful when you are sitting at dinner and it really doesn’t help you to learn Turkish any faster! Staying is a behaviour that requires the dog to inhibit his desire to move, and the recall is a behaviour that requires the dog activate his body and move towards you; these diametrically opposed behaviours can be very confusing when initially paired together, and just don’t have anything to do with leaving something the dog wants (an activation type activity) and coming towards you (another activation type activity that is the opposite of heading towards what the dog wants!).

When you are teaching your dog behaviours like the recall, it is important to help him out by making it as simple and clear as possible. When teaching my dogs to come when called, I have someone hold my dog and I run away so that the dog wants to come towards me; I reward him for doing the right thing that he would likely have done anyhow. This is much like holding up a shaker of salt and shaking some salt into my hand and offering that to you while saying “Tuz” two or three times. I am making it really easy for you to understand that the word for salt in Turkish is Tuz. Then when you encounter salt elsewhere, you have a chance of recognizing that object as “Tuz”.

When your dog is having trouble understanding what you are asking of him, ask yourself if you have made the meaning clear for your dog, or if you have assumed that he has just picked up the information from conversation. If you are not sure, then go back and explain it again, simply, with rewards for the behaviour you are hoping for. Don’t get louder, or repeat yourself, speak slowly, because it doesn’t matter how slowly or loudly you speak in Turkish, I still won’t understand what you are saying.